1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for editing information (speech synthesis information) used for speech synthesis.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional speech synthesis technology, the duration of each phoneme of speech that becomes an object of synthesis (hereinafter referred to as synthetic speech) is designated to be variable. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. Hei06-67685 describes a technology for increasing/decreasing the duration of each phoneme at an expansion/compression degree depending on phoneme type (vowel/consonant) when a time series of phonemes specified from a target arbitrary character string is instructed to be expanded or compressed on the time base.
However, since the duration of each phoneme in real speech does not depend only on phoneme type, it is difficult to synthesize auditorily natural speech in a configuration in which the duration of each phoneme is expanded/compressed at an expansion/compression degree depending only on phoneme type as described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. Hei06-67685.